Hello, my name is Adam, and I think I may be turning into a distance addict.

My plan when I started today was to finish in DeFuniak Springs, which would have been an 85-mile ride. A perfectly respectable distance. When I arrived, it wasn’t even 3:00 PM yet, and I felt like that was just too damned early to quit for the day. Plus the fact that for the first 70 or so miles of my ride, I just couldn’t get into a good groove. My legs felt heavy. This might be exhaustion, it might be that rotten fried-oyster po’boy from yesterday having an effect, I don’t know. Anyhow, when I got to DeFuniak, I took a break, changed maps (because it is the transition between Sections 6 and 7), and considered my options. The small,evocatively named town of Ponce De Leon was only 11 miles away—less than an hour—and Bonifay only about two hours. So I pressed on.

In fairness, DeFuniak looks like it might have been worth stopping at. The town is built around a small lake, with a ring road circumscribing it and some park land, ringed in turn by residences and some city buildings. Idyllic.

The day’s riding to that point wasn’t much to remark on. I could have stayed on US90 all the way from Pensacola; the ACA maps zigzag around on a bike trail and some country roads for a while, mostly to break the monotony, I suppose. US90 is actually quite good for riding, with a reasonably wide, smooth, and clean shoulder. But it’s a long straight line of nothing much. It also runs parallel to I-10 (my guess is that I-10 along here was laid along US90 intentionally), so the string of towns along the route still have interstate-exit traffic. I could often just see I-10 traffic through a row of pines.

At this point I have just under 400 miles to go. If everything goes according to plan (knock wood), I’ll be dipping my wheel in the Atlantic on Tuesday morning and be home the next day. I’ve been working out some of the tour-end logistics, and my old friend from high school, Forrest, will be coming up from his home in Miami to meet me at the end. Looking forward to it.

Only chased by one dog so far in Florida—in that respect it’s not so deep-south. But in another, it is: I’ve seen three instances of the stars and bars here so far, which is two more than I saw in either Alabama or Mississippi, and as many as I saw in Louisiana during the four-odd days I spent there.